


lost/looking

by starlight_sugar



Category: Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 21:44:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15916854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlight_sugar/pseuds/starlight_sugar
Summary: His lips flick up into something like a smile. “I saw your record, Agent Faust. You can figure it out. But only if you live long enough to do it.”(An Ethan/Ilsa roleswap.)





	lost/looking

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fanwork not at all affiliated with the M:I franchise.
> 
> This fic was written for the prompt "role reversal" on my Trope Bingo Round 11 card. It's an Ethan/Ilsa roleswap that takes place during Rogue Nation. The title to this fic is a reference to a line in the wonderful podcast The Far Meridian.
> 
> Content warning for canon-typical violence, both hand-to-hand and with guns.

The first thing Ilsa notices is that her shoes are gone.

Oh, there are other things she’s aware of, loosely. She knows that her hands are cuffed above her head, and she knows that she’s somewhere cold and dingy. It feels like a cellar or a garage. Maybe a dungeon, if she’s feeling prone to fancy. But the first thought that emerges fully-formed from the fog of being drugged is that she’s in her socks, feet twisting on the cold stone floor. She curls her toes, trying to breathe deep and focus in on her situation.

When she opens her eyes, the first man she sees has been legally dead for three years, which is nearly as disconcerting as the second man, who’s giving her a distinctly pleasant smile.

“Janik Vinter,” Ilsa says. She sounds groggy, even to her own ears, but she forces herself to swallow hard and keep talking. She takes a deep breath and slips into Swedish. “ _ Fancy meeting you here. _ ”

“ _ You’ve been looking into things that you shouldn’t, Agent Faust, _ ” Vinter replies, looking unbothered. There’s a side table that’s laid out with his usual spread of torture implements. They’d worked together once on an operation, four or five years ago, and she’d been uneasy to be paired with the infamous Bone Doctor. Ilsa hadn’t cared much for his methods. She wouldn’t speak ill of the dead, of course, not publicly, but if he’s alive then she has no problem calling him a monster.

“ _ And who says I shouldn’t look? _ ” Ilsa replies, tilting her head.

Vinter smiles, looking far too gleeful, and punches Ilsa in the ribs. Hard.

Ilsa doubles over as far as she can and gasps, and it’s not entirely an act, because it fucking  _ hurts. _ But while she’s down she drops her head, letting it loll left (one man, armed) and then right (two men, one armed, one seemingly not but she’s not about to press her luck) before she stumbles upright and looks back at that man by the door, the one who’d caught her attention right after Vinter. He’s handsome, in a way that she can only describe as classically American. He’s dark-haired, not terribly tall but looking relaxed in a collared shirt and slacks, like he’s not at all bothered to be in the room with Vinter’s interrogation. He’s standing behind the torture table, one hand curled by his side, the other resting on-

“Why did you take my shoes?” Ilsa demands in English. “Those are expensive, you know.”

“Oh, I know,” says the American man - and he is most definitely American, with the smoothest, blandest accent she’s ever heard. “They’re far too nice for a place like this. Wouldn’t want you to break one.”

“Yes, because the shoes are what I’m worried about breaking,” Ilsa murmurs, and the man flashes her a disconcertingly easy grin. He ambles around to the other side of the table, like he has all the time in the world. He must be either a sociopath or very experienced in this line of work, she thinks, and there’s not much of a way to tell which is which.

“ _ Enough, _ ” Vinter snaps. “ _ It’s time you learned to mind your business, Faust. _ ”

“ _ She seems like a woman of distinguished business, _ ” the American murmurs in Swedish, with only the slightest of accents. Vinter turns to his table, and the American catches Ilsa’s eyes and grins, like they’re both in on some kind of secret. And then he twists his hand that was curled against his side, just for a second, just long enough for Ilsa to see the key in it. The key that definitely unlocks her handcuffs.

Ilsa raises her eyebrows. The American looks completely unbothered, by her or by their nearly impossible odds. He just leans back against the table as Vinter turns back around, holding what a bonesaw.

She waits until he’s closer to her, just a couple steps away, to say in Spanish, “ _ Are you waiting for something? _ ”

“Oh, no, he’s all yours,” the American replies. Vinter turns to look at him in confusion, twisting around just enough that he’s completely unprepared when Ilsa kicks him in the groin. Hard.

“Ouch,” the American says as Vinter stumbles backwards. He throws the key with an expert flick of the wrist and Ilsa catches it perfectly. She fumbles with the cuffs - it’s hard to unlock something when you can’t even see the lock - as the armed man on the left starts towards her. Ilsa jumps off the ground and uses the cuffs to swing her weight into him, feet-first. The force of the kick throws him back into the wall, and she lands hard, socked feet slipping on the stone. She finally slides the key in and drops her full weight onto the balls of her feet, bouncing hard.

The American throws an elbow, catching the unarmed guard in the face. The armed guard shoots at him but he dodges it, sliding up against the guard’s side and grabbing his arm. Ilsa immediately hits the guard at the elbow, and he yells in pain as he drops the gun. She catches it neatly as the American shoves the guard back, slamming his head against the wall. He crumples to the ground but the unarmed guard gets to his feet, blood streaming from his nose. Ilsa doesn’t think - maybe a blessing, maybe a curse - as she points the gun at his chest and squeezes the trigger twice.

The American looks at her sharply, but whatever he was about to say melts away. “Behind-”

Ilsa whirls around and barely has time to see the guard she’d kicked earlier staggering towards her, gun pointed at her. She shoots him in the chest and he staggers backwards, and before she can do anything else the American grabs something sharp-looking off of Vinter’s table and throws it directly into the guard’s throat.

Ilsa watches him clutch as his throat for a second before turning to look at the American. “You’re no amateur.”

“You’re going to want your shoes,” he replies, and plucks them off the table. “You’re about to be outside.”

Ilsa glances around the room for a second. Vinter looks like he’s out cold, with some bruises that Ilsa doesn’t remember putting there, probably courtesy of the American. The three guards are almost certainly dead. And the American is watching her patiently, eyebrows raised.

“You’re holding those, and I’ll shoot,” she decides.

The American grins. “Follow me.”

He leads the way through a side door, down some stairs, down a passageway. He moves quickly, expertly. She doesn’t recognize him, but then again she hasn’t worked much with American intelligence agencies, and this man is most certainly an agent. Undercover, then. Undercover with what is most certainly The Syndicate.

The American stops just before a gateway and ushers Ilsa forward. She raises the gun and moves through, making it maybe a dozen yards before she realizes he’s not following her. She turns, and he holds out her shoes. “The end of the passageway puts you on a street in London. Not close to public transportation, but close enough that nobody will question it if you walk there from here.”

“You’re not coming with me.”

“I’m not.”

“Why not?”

“I need to stay here.”

“You’re undercover,” Ilsa says, and a shadow of something unrecognizable flickers on his face. “Aren’t you?”

He glances down, then back at her with an unhappy twist to his mouth. “It’s complicated.”

“Tell me who leads The Syndicate.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Tell me your name.”

“I can’t do that either.”

“Tell me your agency.”

“I don’t have an agency,” says the American. “Take your shoes. You don’t have long.”

Ilsa grabs her shoes but doesn’t take them. “Give me something. Please.”

“I’ve given you enough.” His lips flick up into something like a smile, and it’s striking how different it was from his smile before. He’s not laughing at the situation, not performing. Now he’s a little wry, a little tired, completely genuine. “I saw your record, Agent Faust. You can figure it out. But only if you live long enough to do it.”

“Ominous,” Ilsa murmurs, and he lets go of the shoes. “Do try not to blow your cover before I can find you.”

“Be careful,” he answers, and the sincerity behind it is almost enough to knock her off her feet. Instead she takes that momentum and turns and runs, faster than she’s ever run before.

 

#

 

She meets Atlee in the early morning, on a park bench facing a lake. She brings stale bread for the ducks, because he forgets, he always does. He doesn’t smile sideways the way he does sometimes when he sees the loaf. Bad mood, then.

“Yesterday,” Ilsa says, “I was subdued in the early afternoon by agents acting on behalf of the Syndicate.”

“Ilsa,” Atlee sighs, like he’s going to give her the same lecture about chasing ghost stories that she’s heard a thousand times.

“If you’re going to dismiss me, at least ask how I’m faring after being kidnapped,” Ilsa says, and tosses some bread at the ducks.

Atlee at least has the grace to look embarrassed. “Are you alright?”

“Bruised ribs, twisted my ankle on the way out.” Before she’d even put on the heels, which was just insult to injury. “But I escaped.”

“Obviously.”

“With help.”

“Help?”

Ilsa rips off a piece of the bread and squashes it in her palm, like she’s trying to mold it into something. Mostly, it just crumbles and falls to the bench between them. “There’s an American operative working with them. I have reason to believe that he’s not genuinely in support of their mission.”

“And what reason is that?”

“He helped me,”

“Agent Faust.” Atlee takes a piece of the bread and tosses it out, which he only does if he’s considering his words very, very carefully. “I have told you before that the Syndicate is a myth.”

“You think I’m lying about being kidnapped?”

“I think an American operative working with a terror cell helped you escape whatever kidnapping happened.”

“The terror cell included a man who I know to be dead.”

Atlee sighs. “You can’t continue on like this, Ilsa. You’re being hysterical.”

He reaches for the bread but Ilsa pulls it back, stung. “You think I’m being hysterical over being kidnapped? Over what’s potentially the largest international terror cell MI6 has record of?”

“MI6 has no record of the Syndicate. And they won’t, unless you make a record of them.” Atlee raises an eyebrow at her. “Agent Faust, you will not be using official MI6 resources to research a fantasy, is that clear?”

Ilsa takes a deep breath through her nose. Atlee stares at her, placid as the lake in front of them, and she forces herself to exhale. “Clear,” she says. “No official resources.”

“Excellent,” Atlee says. “Now, for your next-”

“Actually,” Ilsa says, getting to her feet, “I’ll be taking a day to recover, physically and emotionally. I’m sure you understand. The effects of kidnapping, and all that.”

Atlee tilts his head at her, looking confused. “Of course,” he says slowly. “Tomorrow, then, for your next assignment.”

“Tomorrow,” Ilsa agrees, and leaves the bread on the bench. With any luck he won’t actually look at the loaf too closely, so he won’t see where she hollowed the loaf out and put in all of her official MI6 trackers. Her phone is in her apartment, where it’ll stay; she’s already cancelled her lease and moved the things she can to storage. Atlee won’t notice anything wrong until tomorrow morning at the latest, and that’s more than enough time for her to disappear.

No official resources. Only her and what she can find. Only Ilsa Faust and the strange American man.

 

#

 

She starts with her contacts in the CIA and, once those are exhausted, moves into the American military. Atlee comes far too close to finding her in Azerbaijan so she moves to Belarus, then China after a week. It takes them nearly two months to find her in Beijing and by then she’s exhausted all the military branches, including the ghost operatives, and most of the FBI. She spends three weeks in Argentina looking into the NSA before she realizes the chances that he’s not an American after all - his Swedish was nearly perfect, and who’s to say an operative couldn’t lose an accent?

Ilsa is about to enter her seventh month in exile, waiting in Lisbon for some other shoe to drop, when she uncovers the IMF.

It’s a ghost of a line in an Australian report, something that should’ve been redacted, but there’s a mention of them working with an operative from Australia, and that’s enough for her to latch onto. They’re a ghost of an organization, more than the Syndicate ever was: there are rumors about them, about them being absolutely off the wall in terms of planning, but they get results. Nearly perfect results.

She knows that’s where to look, with a bone-deep, inexplicable certainty. On the train out of Portugal she digs into every report she can find and then deeper. She reads about Briggs, Armitage, Gormley, Hand, Lambert, Phelps. And in the file about Phelps, she reads about Ethan Hunt. There’s no image attached, just like there isn’t for any of the files. The IMF was disavowed years ago and absorbed into the CIA, but it looks like the straw that broke the camel’s back was Hunt abandoning his mission. He was disavowed, and the organization practically fell apart overnight. Most of the operatives either left or joined the CIA in some capacity. Hunt is still in the wind.

Ilsa reads the file three times. Just to be certain.

 

#

 

She’s in a loft in Paris, an unofficial MI6 safe house founded by agents and kept secret from their handlers, when her phone begins ringing. Her burner phone that she picked up three days ago. The number, when she checks, is blocked.

She flips the phone open. “This is Faust.”

“You answer your burner phone with your real last name?” says an American man, sounding supremely unimpressed.

“I do when I look into an American agency and my brand-new unused phone gets a call.” Ilsa perches on her bed and crosses her legs. “Can I presume I’m speaking to an agent of the IMF?”

“Former,” he replies, and she can hear the strain in his voice.

“Yes, of course. And am I correct in assuming that I reached your radar when I looked into one Agent Hunt?”

The man goes silent for a second. “You said your name was Faust. And you confirmed that’s your real last name.”

Ilsa bites back a curse. She hadn’t even considered that he was trying to trick her into confirming her identity. She’s getting out of practice. “You didn’t provide me with a name.”

“It’s in Ethan’s file. Figure it out.”

“He didn’t work with many American agents, not at the end.” She pauses, flicking through her mental list of names she remembers. “Is this Brandt, then? Or Stickell?”

“Brandt.”

“Agent Brandt, why on earth are you keeping tabs on the file of the man who destroyed your agency?”

“Because the official narrative is bullshit,” Brandt says, and it’s not the expletive that gives Ilsa pause. It’s the level of desperation, roiling underneath the surface of his voice. “Agent Faust - it is agent, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Agent Faust, let me be frank with you. Before he disappeared, Ethan Hunt was looking into a criminal organization called the Syndicate. Have you heard about them?”

She has to grab the edge of her mattress to steady herself. “I have.”

“Do you believe they exist?”

“Why was Ethan Hunt looking into the Syndicate?”

“He believed that they were behind a series of attacks. Minor things at first, and then they slowly became bigger and bigger hits.” Brandt sighs heavily. “Eventually he was on an unrelated assignment in Belgium when he reported that he found what he thought was Syndicate activity. He was told not to pursue it, but he did.”

“And that was two years ago,” Ilsa says. Her voice comes out hushed, because she can hear the pain in Brandt’s voice, the pain that she’s felt time and time again when she lost friends and fellow agents.

“Nobody has seen him since,” Brandt says. “The IMF disbanded. There’s nothing for him to come back to. But one of our analysts set up an alert to see if anyone was looking at IMF files, just in case.”

“You mean his IMF file.”

A pause, then a long exhale. “Yeah, I do. I don’t suppose you’re looking because you’ve seen him.”

“Six months ago,” Ilsa says, before she can think twice or stop herself. If this is a trap, she’s going to drag Brandt into it along with her. There’s no response, so she keeps going. “I was looking into the Syndicate on the behalf of my own agency. I must’ve come too close, because they abducted me off the street, grabbed me and drugged me like a random kidnapping. Agent Hunt was one of the men who took me.”

Brandt takes a sharp breath. “He-”

“-fought four men to help me escape,” Ilsa finishes smoothly. “And probably lost some of his credit undercover in the process. I’ve been trying to determine who he was for the past six months. I left MI6 in order to continue looking into the Syndicate.”

“And have you found anything?”

“Nothing that I’d discuss on an overseas call with a man I’ve never met.”

Brandt huffs out a laugh. “Understandable.”

“But I’ll be in touch, Agent Brandt.”

“No,” he says suddenly, and Ilsa blinks in surprise. “Actually, you won’t. I’ve embedded myself in the CIA. Any effort to find Ethan would be disastrous for all of us in the IMF.”

“Then connect me with another agent.”

“I will.”

“And soon.”

“I will,” Brandt repeats. “And Agent Faust? Thank you.”

“Of course,” Ilsa says quietly. “I’ve lost people. It’s not often you find one.”

“Not in this line of work,” Brandt agrees. “Agent Dunn will be in contact with you by the end of the day. If you find anything, you tell him.”

Ilsa glances at her bedroom wall, already papered with news clippings and red string, a cliche touch that she hadn’t been able to resist. “I will.”

The line clicks silent, and Ilsa places her phone down next to her on the bed. There’s a spot on the wall that’s empty, waiting for a name. She has a rough pencil sketch of an American agent there, one that she’s drawn and redrawn and hoped that she was getting closer to the truth and not further from her memories.

Ilsa reaches to the table beside her bed and picks up a pen. Slowly, holding her breath like he’s going to vanish before her eyes, she writes Ethan Hunt’s name beneath his picture.

“Hunt,” she whispers, and she knows that she will see him again.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on Tumblr or Twitter at @waveridden!


End file.
